V. S. Pritchett Quotes and Sayings - Page 1
More V. S. Pritchett quote about:
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“Short stories can be rather stark and bare unless you put in the right details. Details make stories human, and the more human a story can be, the better.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Writing enlarges the landscape of the mind.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Among the masked dandies of Edwardian comedy, Max Beerbohm is the most happily armored by a deep and almost innocent love of himself as a work of art.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The peculiar foreign superstition that the English do not like love, the evidence being that they do not talk about it.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The present has its élan because it is always on the edge of the unknown and one misunderstands the past unless one remembers that this unknown was once part of its nature.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Absolute Evil is not the kingdom of hell. The inhabitants of hell are ourselves, i.e., those who pay our painful, embarrassing, humanistic duties to society and who are compromised by our intellectually dubious commitment to virtue, which can be defined by the perpetual smear-word of French polemic: the bourgeois. (Bourgeois equals humanist.) This word has long been anathema in France where categories are part of the ruling notion of logique. The word cannot be readily matched in England or America.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Because of the influence of the cinema, most reports or stories of violence are so pictorial that they lack content or meaning. The camera brings them to our eyes, but does not settle them in our minds, nor in time.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Like many popular best-sellers, he was a very sad and solemn man who took himself too seriously and his art not seriously enough.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“One recalls how much the creative impulse of the best-sellers depends upon self-pity. It is an emotion of great dramatic potential.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“On one plane, the very great writers and the popular romancers of the lower order always meet. They use all of themselves, helplessly, unselectively. They are above the primness and good taste of declining to give themselves away.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“There is more magic in sin if it is not committed.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The detective novel is the art-for-art's-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The difference between farce and humour in literature is, I suppose, that farce strums louder and louder on one string, while humour varies its note, changes its key, grows and spreads and deepens until it may indeed reach tragic depths.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“It is well known that, when two authors meet, they at once start talking about money-like everyone else.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Prep school, public school, university: these now tedious influences standardize English autobiography, giving the educated Englishman the sad if fascinating appearance of a stuffed bird of sly and beady eye in some old seaside museum. The fixation on school has become a class trait. It manifests itself as a mixture of incurious piety and parlour game.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“It's very important to feel foreign. I was born in England, but when I'm being a writer, everyone in England is foreign to me.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Now, practically all reviewers have academic aspirations. The people from the universities are used to a captive audience, but the literary journalist has to please his audience.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“I am under the spell of language, which has ruled me since I was 10.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“It is less the business of the novelist to tell us what happened than to show how it happened.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The wrongs of childhood and upbringing have made a large and obsessional contribution to autobiography and the novel.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“It is often said that in Ireland there is an excess of genius unsustained by talent; but there is talent in the tongues.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“I shall never be as old as I was between 20 and 30.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“We do not wish to be better than we are, but more fully what we are.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The novel...creates a bemusing effect. The short story, on the other hand wakes the reader up. Not only that, it answers the primitive craving for art, the wit, paradox and beauty of shape, the longing to see a dramatic pattern and significance in our experience.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The State, that cawing rookery of committees and subcommittees.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The mark of genius is an incessant activity of mind. Genius is a spiritual greed.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Queen Victoria - a mixture of national landlady and actress.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“Those mausoleums of inactive masculinity are places for men who prefer armchairs to women.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“A natural New Yorker is a native of the present tense.”
-- V. S. Pritchett -
“The makers of the short story have rarely been good novelists.”
-- V. S. Pritchett
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